Oakland Museum of California

The Oakland Museum of California or OMCA (formerly the Oakland Museum) is an interdisciplinary museum dedicated to the art, history, and natural science of California, located adjacent to Oak Street, 10th Street, and 11th Street in Oakland, California. The museum contains more than 1.8 million objects dedicated to "telling the extraordinary story of California." History The OMCA was founded in 1969 as merger of three smaller area museums – the Oakland Public Museum, Oakland Art Gallery, and the Snow Museum of Natural History. The seeds of this merger began in 1954 when the three organizations established a nonprofit association with the goal of merging their collections under one umbrella. This plan was eventually realized in 1961 when voters approved a $6.6 million bond issue to start the development of what would become the OMCA campus overlooking Lake Merritt in the city center. The museum's founding credo positioned itself as a “people’s museum,” wherein it was dedicated to representing the diverse communities of Oakland. This rhetoric was by and large influenced by the social and political environment of the late 1960's civil rights movements. (The museum's campus is located adjacent to the Alameda County Court House where at the time of its opening ongoing protests had been taking place to demand freedom for Huey Newton, a co-founder of the Black Panther Party.) In this climate and based the OMCA's founding principles, the inaugural director Jim Holliday lobbied the museum's board of directors to form a community advisory committee in order to diversify representation at the decision-making level for the newly formed museum. This effort led to Holliday being relieved of his duties by the board six months before the museum opened its doors. His termination sparked controversy within the ranks of the museum staff and even provoked the newly hired director of education Julia Hare to resign.